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War is the health of the state
“War Is the Health of the State.” So said Randolph Bourne. “Conservatives” who argue for small government but also advocate intervention in multifarious civil wars throughout the world are not conservatives at all. Rather they are Wilsonian style big-goverment demagogues who stand in the sordid tradition of Roosevelt I, Wilson, Roosevelt II, Johnson, Bush, and Obama.
I like Stefan Molyneux’s converse, “The State is the Health of War.”
The state of mixed war is what the “government” has declared on we the people. Over the years the “government” has become more concerned with protecting the organization and the actors running it than we the people. As far as the health of the organization goes, it is rotten to the core.
Help me out here, guys. What, literally, is that quote saying? I don’t mean the underlying sentiment, I mean the sentence when read in isolation, without context. Grammatically, how do you guys parse and interpret the quote?
To my brain, the quote is as grammatically unparseable as “salad is the health of vegetarians” or “water is the health of farming”.
The phrase was coined by Randolph Bourne, who also wrote “War is a function of states … and could not exist except in such a system”. Now THAT’s a lucid, crystal-clear sentence.
“War is the health of the state” is a powerful piece of language which triggers all the right feelings in readers who already despise war. But it’s a piece of language that sails straight above the heads of those who don’t already have this insight. It causes their eyes to glaze over because, taken literally, it has no meaning. It’s one of those sentences beloved of libertarians, whose meaning is revealed only to those who already understand.
